One on one

Saturday

Alison Eschen may be among a growing number of unmarried women raising children, according to new data from the U.S. Census Bureau, but she wouldn't know it.

Alison Eschen may be among a growing number of unmarried women raising children, according to new data from the U.S. Census Bureau, but she wouldn’t know it.

Raising a kid on your own, she said, can be lonely.

She had given birth a month before she turned 21 and couldn’t really engage in the same social activities as other people her age. She had followed her sister to Dubuque to attend a community college, but dropped out before her son was born, unsure of what she wanted to study.

“I kind of got really depressed for a while because I didn’t really have a social life,” she said. “A lot of the people that I knew who had kids were older, and married.”

Now at 28, Eschen is enrolled at Iowa State University and lives in student family housing off 24th Street in Ames. She still feels isolated more often than not, she said, and most of the other residents in the development are married.

On a recent Saturday, she sat on her front steps and watched her son, Dominic, who just turned 7, play with a group of children. He wore a blue shirt and shorts emblazoned with pictures of sharks. He screamed to get her attention as he climbed onto a picnic table and looked disappointed when she told him to get down.

Eschen pointed out a boy who was playing with her son, noting that he has two parents, as do most of her son’s friends.

“I haven’t really found anybody that’s single and has kids. I don’t know, maybe they’re just hiding,” she said, adding that she’d heard there were lots of other single parents at ISU.

“I’m like, well, where the heck are they?” she said with a laugh.

New census data, however, show there has been a dramatic increase in the number of unmarried women giving birth. The census report focused on data from 2011 but is part of a more long-term trend in changing family dynamics, and women like Eschen, who are in their 20s, are producing the most out-of-wedlock babies.

Nationwide, nearly 36 percent of babies born in 2011 were to unmarried women, the data showed.

While Iowa’s birth rate for unmarried women was significantly below the national average, at 31 percent, according to the census report, data provided through the national Kids Count survey put the number of births to unmarried women in the state a little higher, at 34 percent in 2010.

That was up from 28 percent a decade earlier, according to the survey published by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, a nonpartisan group that tracks data on the well-being of children.

The trend prompts a few common misconceptions, said ISU sociology professor Susan Stewart.

People often think teenagers are behind the increase when the unmarried birth rate is actually highest among women in their 20s, she said. Most also think these women in this category are single, but a large percentage are living with the child’s father, in what’s called a “cohabiting household.”

Stewart attributed the recent spike in babies born to unmarried women to several factors, including the economic downturn, saying birth rates were down overall, along with marriage and divorce rates.

Most couples wait to get married until they feel financially secure, which is why the decline in couples saying “I do” during the recession is not a big surprise, she said.

The downturn was, understandably, also a factor in the increase in children born to unmarried mothers. What’s concerning about this particular trend, though, is the impact on children and families, she said.

On average, Stewart said, kids who grow up without two parents have lower test scores, have higher levels of depression and are more likely to get into trouble. These problems are not a reflection of bad parenting, necessarily, but rather environmental factors that put single-parent families at a disadvantage, Stewart said.

“It’s a combination of lack of parenting support, poverty and children concentrated in low-income neighborhoods with poor schools,” Stewart said. “It’s a whole range of factors.”

Some of those hardships are illustrated through Eschen’s story.

After giving birth, she found it difficult to maintain a job because if her son got sick, she’d sometimes have to leave in the middle of a shift, upsetting her boss. She was determined to go back to college and resumed her classes when Dominic turned 2, relying on government assistantance to help pay her rent and day care fees.

She liked socializing with other people her age, but she also was overwhelmed as she juggled her classes, homework and on-campus job with her motherly duties, which at the time included potty-training her son, then a toddler.

Eschen wasn’t looking for a boyfriend and instead reserved “dates” with Dominic every Sunday, worried that because of her hectic schedule, they weren’t getting enough time together.

She has had relationships with men, she said, but those presented their own set of difficulties.

Guys either got scared off by the fact she had a son, saying they would call but never doing so, or, worse, they thought she was promiscuous, Eschen said. She broke off one relationship because the guy seemed too immature for a family.

Eschen said she had been engaged to her son’s father on two separate occasions, but things didn’t work out, and they are in contact no longer. She said she learned on Facebook he recently had married.

Eschen has worked hard to compensate for not being able to provide her son a two-parent household, telling Dominic multiple times a day that she loves him.

“He knows I’d do anything for him,” she said.

Dominic had trouble in kindergarten and first grade, but she doesn’t attribute those early struggles to her status as a single parent. He’s always been hyperactive, which makes it harder for him to focus, she said.

When he was younger, she couldn’t afford to buy him all the things she wanted to, but things are better now, she said.

Eschen moved to Ames in 2011 and is studying anthropology at ISU. She has a boyfriend whom she met last year, and while she thinks things are becoming more serious, she’s in no rush to get married.

She’s focused on her new job as a customer service representative with a cell phone company, she said.

“I make enough money now to be able to support me and Dominic and have him be able to have the nice things that two parents would be able to do for their child,” Eschen said. “I can do that for my son, and that’s one thing I’m really excited about.”

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